Director of Quality & Continuous Improvement

A growing, privately held specialty manufacturer is seeking its first Director of Quality & Continuous Improvement to design and build a best-in-class operational excellence program across the organization.

The company has built a highly successful, customer-focused business by occupying a valuable niche in the market, maintaining strong margins, and becoming deeply integrated into its customers’ manufacturing processes. As it enters its next stage of growth, the company is investing in the infrastructure, systems, and operating discipline required to scale successfully.

This is not a traditional quality assurance leadership position, nor is it an opportunity to inherit a mature program. The Director will serve as the architect of the company’s approach to continuous improvement and quality—establishing the strategy, systems, standards, metrics, and culture largely from the ground up.

The successful candidate will bring a continuous improvement mindset first. This person must be able to evaluate the entire organization, identify the highest-impact opportunities, and introduce practical processes that improve consistency, efficiency, quality, and scalability without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. The ideal candidate has either built a similar program or developed their expertise within a world-class manufacturing organization and understands what operational excellence looks like.

Key Responsibilities

Architect the Quality Program

• Design and implement a scalable quality management system appropriate for the company’s operations and customer requirements.

• Establish clear quality standards, controls, documentation, metrics, and accountability throughout the organization.

• Strengthen processes related to incoming materials, production quality, finished products, nonconformances, corrective and preventive actions, customer complaints, and supplier quality.

• Move the organization from a primarily reactive quality environment toward a proactive, prevention-based approach.

• Evaluate current testing, documentation, and quality-control practices and develop a prioritized plan for improvement.

• Prepare the organization for future certifications, customer expectations, or regulatory requirements as needed.

• Build processes that promote consistent execution while remaining practical and commercially minded.

Build the Continuous Improvement Strategy

• Assess the company’s current operations, workflows, systems, and organizational capabilities.

• Develop a multiyear roadmap for continuous improvement and quality that aligns with the company’s growth strategy.

• Identify and prioritize opportunities with the greatest potential impact on productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, cost, capacity, and margins.

• Establish a practical operating system for continuous improvement, including governance, project selection, accountability, and performance tracking.

• Translate world-class manufacturing principles into solutions appropriate for the company’s size, culture, and business model.

Lead Enterprise-Wide Improvement

• Partner with leaders across manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, sales, customer service, finance, and other functions to improve end-to-end business processes.

• Lead high-impact initiatives involving process flow, throughput, waste reduction, yield, reliability, scheduling, inventory, cost, and customer responsiveness.

• Apply Lean, Six Sigma, root-cause analysis, value-stream mapping, and other improvement methodologies where they will create meaningful business value.

• Build fact-based performance metrics and dashboards that give leadership greater visibility into operating results.

• Develop a disciplined process for identifying problems, determining root causes, implementing corrective actions, and sustaining improvements.

• Ensure improvement efforts support the speed, flexibility, and customer focus that have driven the company’s success.

Build Capability and a Culture of Improvement

• Create ownership for quality and continuous improvement throughout the company rather than positioning them solely as the responsibility of one department.

• Coach leaders and employees on structured problem-solving, process discipline, and continuous improvement principles.

• Develop internal champions who can lead and sustain improvement initiatives within their respective functions.

• Communicate the business rationale for new processes and earn support from employees at all levels.

• Celebrate measurable progress and establish continuous improvement as a lasting organizational capability.

• Assess the need for additional quality or continuous improvement resources and help build the function over time.

Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a hands-on, strategic manufacturing leader who knows how to build—not simply administer—a continuous improvement and quality program. This person will combine strong technical expertise with the influence, judgment, and communication skills needed to introduce greater operating discipline within an entrepreneurial, customer-focused organization.

Successful candidates will likely bring:

• Significant experience leading continuous improvement, operational excellence, quality, manufacturing engineering, or related functions in a batch manufacturing environment.

• Demonstrated success designing or materially transforming a continuous improvement program, quality system, or broader operational excellence platform.

• Experience within a world-class manufacturing organization with exposure to mature operating systems and proven best practices.

• Strong command of Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, structured problem-solving, root-cause analysis, process mapping, and performance management.

• The ability to evaluate an entire operation, separate symptoms from root causes, and prioritize initiatives based on business impact.

• Experience building systems, standards, metrics, and accountability in an environment where formal processes are still developing.

• A practical approach that balances process discipline with responsiveness, flexibility, and commercial realities.

• Strong change-management skills and the ability to influence employees and leaders without relying solely on positional authority.

• The capacity to move comfortably between executive-level strategy and hands-on work on the manufacturing floor.

• Strong business and financial acumen, including the ability to connect improvement initiatives to capacity, service, cost, margin, and growth.

• Excellent communication, facilitation, coaching, and project leadership skills.

Experience in specialty chemicals, coatings, adhesives, polymers, or a related environment is preferred but not required. Relevant certifications such as Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, ASQ certification, or comparable credentials are beneficial.

Leadership Characteristics

The company is seeking a leader who is:

• An architect: Able to envision the future state and build the systems required to reach it.

• A builder: Energized by creating programs, capabilities, and teams rather than maintaining an established structure.

• Practical: Focused on improvements that produce measurable business results.

• Collaborative: Skilled at building trust across functions and bringing people along through change.

• Hands-on: Willing to work directly with employees, observe processes, analyze problems, and lead implementation.

• Commercially minded: Understands that quality and continuous improvement must strengthen customer relationships, margins, capacity, and growth.

• Adaptable: Able to introduce structure without imposing unnecessary complexity on an entrepreneurial business.

• Persistent: Capable of sustaining momentum and accountability through a multiyear transformation.

Measures of Success

The Director of Quality & Continuous Improvement will be successful by:

• Establishing a clear, leadership-supported roadmap for operational excellence and quality.

• Creating visibility into the company’s most important operating and quality metrics.

• Delivering measurable improvements in productivity, throughput, yield, waste, cost, consistency, and customer satisfaction.

• Implementing a scalable quality management system that reduces variation and prevents recurring problems.

• Developing stronger root-cause analysis and corrective-action capabilities across the organization.

• Building engagement and ownership for continuous improvement at every level.

• Preserving the company’s entrepreneurial speed and customer responsiveness while creating the discipline required to scale.

• Establishing a sustainable foundation that supports the company’s long-term growth and strategic objectives.

Why Consider This Opportunity?

This is a rare opportunity to build an essential business function from the ground up while having the backing of company leadership and a direct influence on the organization’s future.

The Director will not be confined to maintaining an existing quality system or managing incremental projects. This individual will have the opportunity to shape how the company operates, create its future-state infrastructure, and leave a lasting mark on the organization.

For a leader who knows what great manufacturing operations look like—and wants the autonomy to build them—this role offers an unusually meaningful professional opportunity.

#LI-JC1